Remember that your cell phone cannot make phone calls...

All posts Tribbick's posts Post Back to profile

Remember that your cell phone cannot make phone calls without it pinging off towers. Said pings can be accessed by police. Those pings can be used to track your location to within 100 yards/meters. If your phone cannot locate any towers, it will expend increasing amounts of power trying to locate one. Dutch police are well known for using this to track people.

Every phone has at least one unique IMEI number (one per SIM card/eSIM slot) that cannot be changed that can be used to track you. It doesn't matter whether your phone has a SIM or not. It is still pinging towers in case you need it to call 911.

Finally, so long as your phone has power through the battery or plugged into the wall, it is never truly off. This has been used in the past for police to remotely listen in on people

Like 25 Jun 2022 at 3:31 | Open on mstdn.social

9 comments

Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

@trebach This is why I'll never buy a phone whose battery can't be removed.

25 Jun 2022 at 4:03 | Open on mastodon.social

Tribbick

@ifixcoinops Your options for phones are dropping quickly because most new phones don't have removable batteries. My old phone has a removable battery but it's effectively e-waste because it's stuck on Android 5. Only bootloaders that were signed by Verizon can be loaded onto that phone so I can't put LineageOS or anything like that on there

26 Jun 2022 at 14:21 | Open on mstdn.social

DELETED

@trebach on the other hand, the #gnome location service believes I am in Boston ;).

25 Jun 2022 at 14:38 | Open on fosstodon.org

Attila Kinali

@trebach Cell phones use cell towers to communicate. Film at 11.

26 Jun 2022 at 6:26 | Open on society.oftrolls.com

Relee the Squirrel

@trebach I don't really believe in the efficacy of riots, and don't generally want to encourage crime (most crime), but even non-violent protestors regularly get arrested or worse, so I'm going to boost this and spread the word.

26 Jun 2022 at 11:31 | Open on plush.city

Tribbick

@relee I don't want to encourage crime either, but either agent provocateurs or opportunists will cause property damage while embedded in a protest so that it will be branded a riot and get people arrested. It happened here last year during the George Floyd protests when right wingers and anarchists buried themselves in the crowd for a while and then started smashing windows along the march route.

26 Jun 2022 at 14:13 | Open on mstdn.social

Tribbick

@relee Also, this is probably going to be deleted in 2 weeks so copy this down along with any other relevant toots. I may or may not copy it over to my blog but don't rely on that.

26 Jun 2022 at 14:24 | Open on mstdn.social

Lighty, On Four Strong Paws

@trebach Another thing to caution with this: The cops in a lot of places also have something called a 'stingray'. Basically a fake celltower that outpowers the ones around it and intercepts data.

I don't know how much they can actually see offhand, but I know it's at least enough to ID the phone itself.

26 Jun 2022 at 15:05 | Open on vulpine.club

Seph Harrison♊ ✅

@trebach And keep in mind that there are ways around warrants for this stuff, after all there are many companies that specialize in collecting and reselling data, and no warrant is needed to purchase it.

26 Jun 2022 at 15:18 | Open on venera.social